A WMN is a communication network made up of radio nodes organized in a mesh topology. The WMN is typically self-organizable and self-configurable with the advantages of low cost, ease of deployment and/or high reliability. Due to these advantages, a WMN can have important commercial applications. For example, a WMN can be employed as community wireless network to provide broadband internet access to residential users.
A multi-radio multi-channel (MRMC) WMN is a multi-hop communication network made up of radio nodes (e.g., IEEE 802.11 radio nodes) that can transmit and/or receive data on different channels. For example, in an MRMC network, nodes can transmit and receive packets simultaneously by communicating with their neighbors via different orthogonal frequency channels. Hence, an MRMC WMN can achieve higher system throughput than a traditional single-channel single-radio WMN. As such, MRMC WMNs are of interest in academia and commercial sectors.
The throughput of an MRMC WMN can be largely affected by interference. Such interference can be caused or exacerbated by the channel and routing assignments in the MRMC WMN. Unfortunately, solving routing and channel assignment problems are complex. As a result, channel and routing assignments are typically performed separately as opposed to being performed jointly. In some conventional approaches to routing, a path between a source node and a destination node is routed via multiple hops. Many routing algorithms employ the shortest path first approach for assigning the route between the source node and the destination node. These algorithms consider the hop distance, expected transmission time and/or expected transmission count. Still other approaches perform channel assignment separate from routing assignment and then perform joint rate allocation and multipath routing, which results in high complexity and losses in computational efficiency. Other algorithms unfortunately either ignore the effect of traffic load on the interference of the network or are not adaptive to the changes of traffic load. Yet other algorithms require high-precision clock synchronization among the nodes. These algorithms require a selection of routing and channel according to the synchronized time slots, which is often impractical for reasons of cost in commodities. Further, numerous algorithms are limited by being centralized in nature and cannot be extended to a distributed environment. As such, systems, apparatus and methods that provide low-complexity joint channel and routing assignment considering traffic flow are desirable.